THE CAVE-DWELLERS OF THE SAN FRANCISCO MOUNTAINS. 275 
impossible to know much; yet the proof of a few characteristics are sufficiently 
established. They were a people of medium or rather inferior size, which is proved 
by the low erection of the rooms they inhabited and the alcoves in which they 
filept, neither being adapted to people over five feet high. They were a working 
people, fond of their homes and society, because they lived in compact villages, 
rcade pottery and cultivated the soil. 
The ground is literally strewn with fragments of broken pottery in form and 
quality embracing all the styles of that made by the Pueblo Indians of to-day. 
This pottery has one and only one distinctive feature; it is, when painted at all, 
only painted on the inside. 
It is sometimes roughly chased on the outside, but the coloring is on the 
inside. In all other respects the earthy pigments, mixed with chamber lye, 
furnished the material and it was laid on with sharp sticks for brushes, the same 
as the Indians of to-day do their work. 
That they were agriculturists is proved by the Me-hot-tas (left in the caves) 
on which they ground their grain, and also the proximity of their villages to 
extensive areas of land well adapted to cultivation. 
Their supply of water came from lakes and springs which have disappeared 
through various causes. Some of the lakes (or, as they are now called, tanks) 
were formed by the construction of dams across the foot of valleys — others were 
natural formations, but in all cases the marks are still plainly visible to the ordin- 
ary reader of nature's evolutions. 
The only evidences they have left of any warlike implements are a few very 
-small stone arrow-heads, which could only have been used in hunting small 
game. 
The decaying remnants of the bones of both birds and animals, from the 
smallest wren or gopher up to the deer and antelope, are found by digging in the 
debris around their dvrellings — but so far I have been unable to find the slightest 
>trace of any human graves or skeletons, and although they were a people who 
used but little fire, probably none at all inside their dwellings, that they cremated 
the bodies of their dead seems probable. 
These people deliberately abandoned their homes, taking with them all their 
household goods — they could not have been either destroyed or driven away, or 
more evidences of their possession would have been left behind. 
These caves must have been constructed and inhabited within the last thou- 
sand years, and it is not at all improbable that they were still occupied five or 
even three hundred years ago. 
The elements are not so gentle either in winter or summer among these 
mountain peaks as to leave such works — exposed as they are to their fury — with- 
out making serious efforts toward their obliteration, and yet these works are in a 
remarkable state of preservation to have stood even one thousand years. Aside 
from the actual dwellers in the caves, a part of these people lived in detached 
hamlets and single houses, scattered over the plain at considerable distances. 
The location and general characteristics of these lone huts would lead to the sup- 
